Encourage staff to share what they know

A study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior points out that companies investing in knowledge-transfer software aren’t seeing much improvement in their information flow. One reason: Employees simply won’t share what they know.

“A lot of companies have jumped on the bandwagon of knowledge sharing” by investing heavily in software, says one of the authors. “It was a case of, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ But they didn’t come.”

Unlike knowledge hoarding, knowledge hiding is when someone intentionally conceals information from a colleague—perhaps out of distrust, or to undermine the other person.

Authors of the study say that people tend to hide knowledge in one of three ways:

1. Playing dumb. Employees pretend not to have the requested information.